Training For Terror

It looked as though half of Crystal Daly's finger had been shot off by a student terrorist at Royal Palm Beach High School. Blood oozed from her shoulder, pierced by a bullet.

Daly, 14, a member of the Boynton Beach Police Explorers, is an excellent actress. She joined 50 other students and SWAT teams from throughout Palm Beach County to simulate a school massacre on Wednesday, complete with pistols, gunshots, pipe bombs, student assassins dressed in black, men in combat fatigues and bloodied victims sprawled in the hallways. The drill was based on this spring's fatal shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado.

"You run these scenarios through your mind over and over," said Steve Klemark, the police officer assigned to Royal Palm Beach High. "When I saw `dead' kids in the hallway, I understood what the officers at Columbine went through."

School police officers from throughout the United States and Canada viewed the action live on a screen in the high school's auditorium. About 600 officers are in town for the annual convention of the National Association of School Resource Officers.

Palm Beach County officers were critiqued on Wednesday's drill. Ron McCarthy, a former Los Angeles Police Department supervisor who works as a law enforcement consultant, said the police units worked well together. But he pointed out a few shortcomings: They needed better communications equipment, should have brandished their rifles instead of pistols, and moved too slowly.

"The fallacy is that time is on your side," McCarthy said. "But the truth is that suspects dictate the timeline. The police have to move as fast as possible with little regard for their own safety."

Schools Police Chief Jim Kelly said he will pass along what the officers learned on Wednesday to police chiefs and the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.

School police throughout the country have been working to prevent tragedies similar to Columbine, said Curt Lavarello, the association's executive director and a former Palm Beach County school police officer.

"It's on everybody's minds," he said. "The officers know it could happen at their jobs on any given day."

Dallas Chisholm, a police officer at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale, said he has had to lock up his school several times because of violence in the surrounding neighborhood.

"If I hear anything about a gun, I get on the phone," Chisholm said. "I sit the kid down and interrogate. We have a code over the loudspeaker for teachers to lock their doors. I take nothing for granted now."

Lois Solomon can be reached at lsolomon@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6536.